Navigator undefined on React Typescript Firebase project

Question

I've been googling for a couple hours now and can't seem to resolve my issue.

I have a webpack/React/Typescript/Mobx setup and am attempting to use firebase.

Here is my webpack config: (boilerplate from this repo)

var webpack = require('webpack');
var path = require('path');

// variables
var isProduction = process.argv.indexOf('-p') >= 0;
var sourcePath = path.join(__dirname, './src');
var outPath = path.join(__dirname, './dist');

// plugins
var HtmlWebpackPlugin = require('html-webpack-plugin');
var ExtractTextPlugin = require('extract-text-webpack-plugin');
var WebpackCleanupPlugin = require('webpack-cleanup-plugin');

module.exports = {
  context: sourcePath,
  entry: {
    main: './main.tsx'
  },
  output: {
    path: outPath,
    filename: 'bundle.js',
    chunkFilename: '[chunkhash].js',
    publicPath: '/'
  },
  target: 'web',
  resolve: {
    extensions: ['.js', '.ts', '.tsx'],
    // Fix webpack's default behavior to not load packages with jsnext:main module
    // (jsnext:main directs not usually distributable es6 format, but es6 sources)
    mainFields: ['module', 'browser', 'main'],
    alias: {
      app: path.resolve(__dirname, 'src/app/'),
      assets: path.resolve(__dirname, 'src/assets/')
    }
  },
  module: {
    rules: [
      // .ts, .tsx
      {
        test: /\.tsx?$/,
        use: [
          isProduction
            ? 'ts-loader'
            : {
                loader: 'babel-loader',
                options: {
                  babelrc: false,
                  plugins: ['react-hot-loader/babel']
                }
              },
          'ts-loader'
        ],
        // : ['babel-loader?plugins=react-hot-loader/babel&presets=', 'ts-loader'],
        exclude: /node_modules/
      },
      // css
      {
        test: /\.css$/,
        exclude: /node_modules/,
        use: ExtractTextPlugin.extract({
          fallback: 'style-loader',
          use: [
            {
              loader: 'css-loader',
              query: {
                modules: true,
                sourceMap: !isProduction,
                importLoaders: 1,
                localIdentName: '[local]__[hash:base64:5]'
              }
            },
            {
              loader: 'postcss-loader',
              options: {
                ident: 'postcss',
                plugins: [
                  require('postcss-import')({ addDependencyTo: webpack }),
                  require('postcss-url')(),
                  require('postcss-cssnext')(),
                  require('postcss-reporter')(),
                  require('postcss-browser-reporter')({
                    disabled: isProduction
                  })
                ]
              }
            }
          ]
        })
      },
      {
        test: /\.css$/,
        include: /node_modules/,
        use: ['style-loader', 'css-loader']
      },
      // static assets
      { test: /\.html$/, use: 'html-loader' },
      { test: /\.(png|jpg)$/, use: 'url-loader?limit=10000' },
      { test: /\.webm$/, use: 'file-loader' }
    ]
  },
  optimization: {
    splitChunks: {
      name: true,
      cacheGroups: {
        commons: {
          chunks: 'initial',
          minChunks: 2
        },
        vendors: {
          test: /[\\/]node_modules[\\/]/,
          chunks: 'all',
          priority: -10
        }
      }
    },
    runtimeChunk: true
  },
  plugins: [
    new WebpackCleanupPlugin(),
    new ExtractTextPlugin({
      filename: 'styles.css',
      disable: !isProduction
    }),
    new HtmlWebpackPlugin({
      template: 'assets/index.html'
    })
  ],
  devServer: {
    contentBase: sourcePath,
    hot: true,
    inline: true,
    historyApiFallback: {
      disableDotRule: true
    },
    stats: 'minimal'
  },
  devtool: 'cheap-module-eval-source-map',
  node: {
    // workaround for webpack-dev-server issue
    // https://github.com/webpack/webpack-dev-server/issues/60#issuecomment-103411179
    fs: 'empty',
    net: 'empty'
  }
};

Just by including firebase in my app i relentlessly end up with this error:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'navigator' of undefined    auth.esm.js?69b5:10 

I have tested by including a simple component like so:

import * as React from 'react';
import * as Styles from './styles.css';
import 'app/utils/FirebaseUtil';

interface TestProps {}

export const Test: React.StatelessComponent<TestProps > = () => (
    <div className={Styles.root}>
        {'Hello World'}
    </div>
);

FirebaseUtil:

import * as firebase from 'firebase';

const config = {
  apiKey: '**my key here**',
  authDomain: '** my domain here **'
};

firebase.initializeApp(config);

export const fbAuth = firebase.auth;

No matter what I seem to do I get the navigator error. Even if i dont export the auth object. As far as I can tell its related to babel-loader adding strict-mode according to this SO question, i think? All other related searches seem to have to do with firebase-ui, which i am not using in any way.

But I have no idea how he manages to turn off strict mode, not to mention the OP is not using typescript and I am using ts-loader in this case. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get it working. Aside from all of this if I do try use the firebase object for auth() for example I get a bunch of warnings from webpack about auth not existing on the firebase object. Totally stumped.

Answer 1

So in case anyone else runs into this problem. It appears it was a package version issue. Im assuming that the package versions specifically included in the boilerplate i used didn't play well with firebase.

I updated typescript, react-hot-loader, and most likely the issue webpack from version 3.0.4 to 4.12.1 and things seem to be working ok now. Also with the updates I now import firebase like so:

import firebase from '@firebase/app';
import '@firebase/auth';

Hope this helps someone.

Answer 2

In my case I fixed this importing functions

import firebase from 'firebase/app'
import 'firebase/functions'
import 'firebase/analytics'